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“Big Brother”: She’s gone! Why it wasn’t as satisfying as it could have been.

After all, Big Brother Barbie got the racist mean girl edit on the official CBS version of the “trapped in the closet house” reality show, and then got the shock of her life when Julie Chen and an unhappy studio audience’s boos enlightened her that perhaps she wasn’t the most popular person in the house. At all. And it was satisfying to see her finally reap at least a little of the nastiness she sowed in the house.

But Aaryn, the people who watch the live feeds, and anybody who’s read about them knows that Aaryn did and said far worse things than Julie reminded her of. They also know that the person who came off the worst this season was Boca Raton’s Amanda Zuckerman, who with her showmancey buddy McCrae ran the house with a noxious cocktail of intimidation, fear, slurs, bullying and just plain awful behavior. So we were all waiting for Julie to give Amanda the same honest treatment she gave Aaryn, at least to the extent that it didn’t give away things that a jury member, which she is now, shouldn’t know.

Didn’t happen.

Julie lobbed several softballs at Amanda, acknowledging the boos of the live audience and asking her about bullying, but not touching on the really heinous stuff that was on the live feeds, like her reference to “Puerto Rican showers” or her desire, however joking, to do harm to various Houseguests with random objects. Julie only lightly addressed things done on the CBS version, like her terrorizing Elissa, which Amanda apologized for. But there was no comeuppance. This leads me to believe:
– CBS is only addressing the stuff that made the broadcast version, which is stupid since they know that this year, perhaps more than any other, the live feed hijinks are known to everyone, so they aren’t fooling anybody. We all know they’re sanitizing the behavior of the house’s least popular person – which is a hard position to achieve, since there are almost no likeable people in that place. So this willful whitewashing is frustrating, and pointless. The gig is up. So why would they do that? Maybe because…
– This is the narrative they want, live feeds and reality be darned. There are rumors that Amanda is friends with producer Allison Grodner, and that the game was swayed in her favor. I don’t think that is possible, but she certainly did get a kinder CBS edit than Aaryn when she wasn’t any nicer.

Amanda’s contention to Julie is that this is a game, and that she was just playing it. I get that, and since I have never been on one of these shows I can’t imagine what it does to your head. But it’s safe to say that nobody has come off heroic here. Who we have left in the house and in contention for the prize money are:
– Andy, a floater who has stabbed everybpdy in the back, which is understandable in this game. But he did it in the weaseliest way imagainable, and then wanted to cry and get hugs about it. Ick.
– GinaMarie, a charming lass with a weird fixation over a failed showmance and a way with words that include calling welfare “n—-r” insurance, racially insulting the young son of a fellow houseguest, taunting an adopted houseguest with how her mother didn’t want her and generally coming off like a crazy person.
– Spencer, who’s said some really sexist things.
– Judd, who on the CBS version seems mostly harmless but in the feeds has stabbed in the back people it seems he had no reason to have beef with, like Candice.
– McCrae, who sat back and let Amanda do his dirty work for him.

I don’t want to give any of these people anything. And I’m curious how CBS can justify the whole show, which is the watching of these people 24/7 so that they have no secrets, when they can’t admit that we’re seeing what we’re seeing.

I can’t wait for this to be over. And I can’t wait for everyone, including Amanda, to be confronted with the nastiness they’ve wrought. I hope we get to talk to her, because I have so many questions. A lot of them.